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I play against unbound all the time i think it kind of broken because it lets people run 3riptides 2 wrightkints 2dreadknights and 2knights. This is what a normal list looks like in my meta.
So i would like other people opinions and experience with unbound armys
Also my group does not play mission as i the only obe who wants to so i out voted are games are just death matchs last one standing wins

absolutely yes, but with a caveat.

allow a Waac player to take unbound and you will come a cropper against some truly stupid things, let some kid play his greater deamon with his carnifex and a unit of guard and you will likely be ok, unbound is the last straw of army balance that GW has thrown out.

There was an unbound tournament here and it was won by the Find a better expression in future. Reds8n Ctan and a FW 400pt 4 D blast shooting Stompa full of meks. Most games were finished in under 30 minutes and had no tactical value.

Really unbound didn't need to be a rule, beginners were doing it anyway (I know I did) and really the only thing you gain from it is taking something that is completely unbalanced.

Unbound is mainly useful in letting you know your opponent's list is legal. All the multiple CADs and other shenaggins just confuse everything.

Unbound is just monstrously stupid. I don't even care if its breaks the game or not, its just quite possibly the stupidest thing you can publish in a ruleset.

"Here's a bunch of pages explaining how to make an army. And here's a paragraph telling you to ignore all of that and just take whatever you want! Narrative! Forging! Fluff! Fun!"

zilka86 wrote:
I play against unbound all the time i think it kind of broken because it lets people run 3riptides 2 wrightkints 2dreadknights and 2knights. This is what a normal list looks like in my meta.
So i would like other people opinions and experience with unbound armys
Also my group does not play mission as i the only obe who wants to so i out voted are games are just death matchs last one standing wins

No, in this case Unbound is not breaking the game, your players are. Sorry to sound harsh, but there is nothing in Unbound that requires you to spam the most optimum units possible as much as you can. Unbound in itself is not an issue, the issue here is the mentality of the players that feel the need to go to extreme lengths to win a game of toy soldiers. I can assure you that even with the old style FOC in place they would still be building lists that took the best of everything, and the situation would be just as bad.

My suggestion would be to find other players or other games, but from your other thread I see that may not be possible so I don't know what to suggest.

Clearly its the players fault and not the rules designers who, you know, made the rules and published it.

Damn those players for playing within the rules using lists and models they want! Curse them!

No offense but your local group seems like a bunch of 12 year olds. I don't see how any normal adult would find it fun to play purge the alien over and over with the most broken unbound list possible. That's something you do for laughs once, realize how broken it is and never do it again. If I were you, I would field a transcendent c'tan and fill in the points with imperial knights. Stomp them and then they'll get tired of playing those games so you can move on to playing real 40k.

Unbound let's players play what they want.
Some people are surprised when players play what they want. C-tans, IK's and Reavers.
This is my shocked face.

 Blacksails wrote:
Clearly its the players fault and not the rules designers who, you know, made the rules and published it.

Damn those players for playing within the rules using lists and models they want! Curse them!

Exactly, everything is within the rules, the players have chosen to take those rules and use them to create the best armies possible.

What makes you think that they wouldn't do the same within any structure that did exist. As all the threads from pre-Unbound 40k complaining about balance can prove, it was perfectly possible to build a similarly unbalanced army within the framework of the FOC. I can't imagine that all these players had a sudden change of mindset as soon as Unbound was introduced and went out to buy all these lists just to win games. They are sure to have held the same mindset before 7th, all Unbound does is allow them to take it further, which, given what was possible before, is not a huge leap.

Imbalance could be considered the cause of this, but not Unbound.

Yes, but not because of Unbound itself. Unbound could be a good idea since it brings back some of the flexibility of older editions, where you could do for instance a Space Marine army with all jump packs, or the Biel-Tan Swordwind army with lots of Aspect Warriors, or a non-Deathwing 1st Company Marine army. Those are good, fluffy things that allow for themes or customization.

The problem with Unbound is that it also opens the floodgates for crazy combinations that have no basis in an army background and is picked entirely to win (see my thread about the "Spirit of the Game" as outlined in an old White Dwarf) without doing anything to restrict them. The allies system started this, and Unbound just threw everything out while at the same time keeping up the GW trend of putting the blame on the players for taking something that they are allowed to. It's like if you showed somebody several colored balloons and told them they can pick any one of them, and then yelling at them and calling them a cheat and a terrible person for picking the red balloon, even though you allowed them to pick the red balloon in the first place.

In a real game, the rules and armies would be balanced enough that adding Unbound wouldn't break the game; the guy who fields 3 Riptides, a Wraithknight and an Imperial Knight might have a powerful army, but he also only has 5 models that can be killed with strategy or ignored completely depending on the mission/scenario. In 40k, with its unbalanced and often vague rules, those 5 models can devastate entire armies because they are just head and shoulders better on the tabletop because reasons and with Unbound they can all be fielded together even though that makes virtually no sense at all.

That's the problem with Unbound: It took already bad and unbalanced rules and said to hell with it, take whatever you want we don't care anymore, but your bad and should feel bad if you dare to take some of the options that we're letting you take.

 Paradigm wrote:


Exactly, everything is within the rules, the players have chosen to take those rules and use them to create the best armies possible.

What makes you think that they wouldn't do the same within any structure that did exist. As all the threads from pre-Unbound 40k complaining about balance can prove, it was perfectly possible to build a similarly unbalanced army within the framework of the FOC. I can't imagine that all these players had a sudden change of mindset as soon as Unbound was introduced and went out to buy all these lists just to win games. They are sure to have held the same mindset before 7th, all Unbound does is allow them to take it further, which, given what was possible before, is not a huge leap.

Imbalance could be considered the cause of this, but not Unbound.

If the game was well structured, well written, and well balanced, we wouldn't have to lay any blame anywhere. There would be no pointing of fingers, no accusation of WAAC, no complaining people try to win too hard. There would just be players playing a game.

When the rules leave exploits or poor balance, players will inevitably gravitate towards stronger combinations. Let's face it, most people don't enjoy getting beaten over and over again. So in the case of 40k, a divide gets created between so called fluffy players and competitive players, where each looks down on the other. Players get blamed for problems in the game when the issue stems from the rules. When the issue stems from the rules, the only people to blame are the people who created the rules.

While you're correct people will be in the mindset to win regardless of how well or poorly the rules are written, a well written and balanced game wouldn't have the problem surface where players are getting trounced for bringing a certain selection of miniatures.

Unbound only made the balance issues worse in the game. Blaming players for using Unbound within its rules and indeed spirit is the last thing you should be doing. Blame the developers for releasing such a shoddy product. Don't look down on those who enjoy the game differently than you.

I find the whole player shaming and blaming nonsense to only make the issue even worse. This particular complaint could be avoided had Unbound never seen the light of day. In its place, you'd have a complaint about how powerful Eldar are, or some other list/codex, but again, those are products of poor writing and not inherent to players being donkey-caves.

The only time a player causes a problem is when the problem is independent of the rules. A loud, rude, obnoxious, smelly, dorito covered guy who touches your models, breaks models, and makes games unpleasant is a player problem. Jimmy from the store who likes his 5 IK list is not a player problem.

Unbound is a useful tool for things like planned out Campaign games (for example, I played a fun Air Raid game against a big fortification).

The thing is, there was nothing really preventing you from doing stuff like this before. All Unbound did was give player's the expectation that if they show up with a list of nothing but Riptides to their flgs, they should expect people to play them without complaint. It was a bad move for the pickup game scene.

 jasper76 wrote:
It was a bad move for the pickup game scene.

Which might have been the entire point, since 40k isn't conducive to pickup games but the ideal seems to be a known gaming club where nobody would dare to play a list of nothing but Riptides because it's against the spirit of the game.

@ Blacksails:A lot of what you say is fair enough, which is why I won't try and claim 40k is balanced: it's not, but has it ever stated it was trying to be? I wouldn't assume that it's a major concern for grew GW when writing the rules, given the attitude we know they hold and the attitude they want/expect players to hold (see the Spirit of the Game thread).

But that aside, you point out yourself that if Unbound didn't exist this thread works still exist, just with a different title. You could swap Unbound for Eldar, Detachments, Dataslates, Warlord Traits, any aspect of the rules. The fact is that players like the OP describes will the power of their armies to the limit of the rules, no matter what that limit is. In 5th, it was the best units of the various FOC slots in your army, in 6th it was that plus the best of another army in an allied detachment, in 7th it's all the best units in the game in a single army.

Taking 40k as it is, not as we'd like it to be, we have to accept the game is unbalanced, as that's not going to change time soon. Accepting that the game is unbalanced also means that lists can/will take the best and most imbalanced units, and it's common knowledge that these lists are unfun to face unless you have similar lists yourself. Therefore, the players that take them must know the effect their list has on the game, don't care about their opponent enough to change it, which to me shows the utmost contempt to the game, it's spirit, and the opponent.

There is a problem, it does exist, and I won't say otherwise. And while this may well come from some part of the game or the players (and let's face it, it's both), it's certainly not Unbound, which is what this thread is about.

I could accept that the game is unbalanced IF I played in a set group with people who would never abuse it. That's the crux of the entire Spirit of the Game issue: It's not grounded in reality. The way GW plays the game is a way virtually nobody else plays it, and they don't even acknowledge that to be the case.

I get that they are trying to be as lax as possible with restrictions to not prevent that one off scenario where you have a horde versus 3 Riptides or whatever, but the fact is that most people do not play in social clubs where you can have a gentleman's agreement not to abuse Unbound or Wave Serpents or whatever.

Why should we accept a game that is deeply flawed, just because its always been that way?

Seems a little defeatist if you ask me. Given the price, I expect the people making the game to make a game worthy of that price tag.

I don't people are going to stick around and accept that the game is both overpriced and poorly designed. Cases like the OP are going to drive people out of the game for good.

For the sake of the game itself, I certainly hope we and the developers don't accept mediocrity just because its always been that way.

 Paradigm wrote:
@ Blacksails:A lot of what you say is fair enough, which is why I won't try and claim 40k is balanced: it's not, but has it ever stated it was trying to be? I wouldn't assume that it's a major concern for grew GW when writing the rules, given the attitude we know they hold and the attitude they want/expect players to hold (see the Spirit of the Game thread).

But that aside, you point out yourself that if Unbound didn't exist this thread works still exist, just with a different title. You could swap Unbound for Eldar, Detachments, Dataslates, Warlord Traits, any aspect of the rules. The fact is that players like the OP describes will the power of their armies to the limit of the rules, no matter what that limit is. In 5th, it was the best units of the various FOC slots in your army, in 6th it was that plus the best of another army in an allied detachment, in 7th it's all the best units in the game in a single army.

Taking 40k as it is, not as we'd like it to be, we have to accept the game is unbalanced, as that's not going to change time soon. Accepting that the game is unbalanced also means that lists can/will take the best and most imbalanced units, and it's common knowledge that these lists are unfun to face unless you have similar lists yourself. Therefore, the players that take them must know the effect their list has on the game, don't care about their opponent enough to change it, which to me shows the utmost contempt to the game, it's spirit, and the opponent.

There is a problem, it does exist, and I won't say otherwise. And while this may well come from some part of the game or the players (and let's face it, it's both), it's certainly not Unbound, which is what this thread is about.

No we don't.
I didn't accept it and stopped playing. I expect more for my money.

 Blacksails wrote:
Why should we accept a game that is deeply flawed, just because its always been that way?

Seems a little defeatist if you ask me. Given the price, I expect the people making the game to make a game worthy of that price tag.

I don't people are going to stick around and accept that the game is both overpriced and poorly designed. Cases like the OP are going to drive people out of the game for good.

For the sake of the game itself, I certainly hope we and the developers don't accept mediocrity just because its always been that way.

I think part of the issue is that GW has always designed the game around the way they play it, with enough leeway to not just say "You can only play it this way". It seems to me that they acknowledge(d) that there were different playstyles and that they had to accommodate them, but because they looked down on it ("playing to win" for example) they didn't give balance more than a cursory thought because in their mind, if you play the game differently you are playing it wrong, they just can't flat out say that.

As Blacksails points out, the big problem with this approach is that the rules are probably the most expensive currently on the market, so you're paying a premium for bad rules unless you play it in exactly the way the designers do (and they don't tell you exactly how they play), and even then the rules are still bad and require fixing on the players' end.

<Deleted...misread earlier post>

WayneTheGame wrote:

I think part of the issue is that GW has always designed the game around the way they play it, with enough leeway to not just say "You can only play it this way". It seems to me that they acknowledge(d) that there were different playstyles and that they had to accommodate them, but because they looked down on it ("playing to win" for example) they didn't give balance more than a cursory thought because in their mind, if you play the game differently you are playing it wrong, they just can't flat out say that.

Like the whole 'nerf chaplain, buff Librarian' nonsense they managed to come up with during their 'playtesting'.

As Blacksails points out, the big problem with this approach is that the rules are probably the most expensive currently on the market, so you're paying a premium for bad rules unless you play it in exactly the way the designers do (and they don't tell you exactly how they play), and even then the rules are still bad and require fixing on the players' end.

Indeed.

WayneTheGame wrote:
I could accept that the game is unbalanced IF I played in a set group with people who would never abuse it. That's the crux of the entire Spirit of the Game issue: It's not grounded in reality. The way GW plays the game is a way virtually nobody else plays it, and they don't even acknowledge that to be the case.
.

I think you've hit the nail on head about what GW want, and imagine, when they write their rules. However, I don't think the gaming club is as rare as you think, especially here in UK where GW are based. Here, gaming clubs are the norm and the FLGS is practically non-existant outside of GW stores, and so it's this environment they tailor the game for and in which it works best. I have no idea why the situation is reversed elsewhere, but at their very start, it was is this kind of environment and setting that the guys who wrote the game lived and gamed. Whether they should have/have to adapt is another discussion altogether...

Although, I would wonder why it's any different with a less established group of players. Maybe I'm idealising, but I don't see why the anonymity in a less regular group makes one more comfortable with building lists known to be annoying to face, or to exploit the game in ways it clearly isn't meant for. You don't need to be best buddies with your opponent to be able to take into account their experience and enjoyment and put them first.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 MWHistorian wrote:

 Paradigm wrote:
we have to accept the game is unbalanced

No we don't.
I didn't accept it and stopped playing. I expect more for my money.

OK, allow me to rephrase: if we're playing 40k, then we have to accept that. Of course you're free to go and play something else, but that doesn't change the facts of 40k, and that's what the discussion is about.

In the FLGS/pickup game culture the issue is, I think, that you're more likely to play a game against someone you don't really know, so it's rude to present a list of restrictions or whatnot. While in a gaming club it's not that unheard of to have "club rules" that outline things like games are X points unless agreed upon, no Titans/superheavies, etc.

In a club that's fine because club members are expected to abide by the rules, but it's not the same if Bob goes down to the game store and expects Jim to adhere to his rules for a game. Jim might play, but it doesn't seem right.

It's hard to explain, honestly.

WayneTheGame wrote:
In the FLGS/pickup game culture the issue is, I think, that you're more likely to play a game against someone you don't really know, so it's rude to present a list of restrictions or whatnot. While in a gaming club it's not that unheard of to have "club rules" that outline things like games are X points unless agreed upon, no Titans/superheavies, etc.

In a club that's fine because club members are expected to abide by the rules, but it's not the same if Bob goes down to the game store and expects Jim to adhere to his rules for a game. Jim might play, but it doesn't seem right.

It's hard to explain, honestly.

Hmm, I kind of see where you're coming from, but still don't entirely get it. I wouldn't advocate turning up to a game and handing over a list of restrictions, but I don't quite see why you can't police yourself. If, when making lists, everyone were to think 'would I enjoy seeing this across the table?', and all built so that the answer was yes, there wouldn't be need for swapping house rules at the start of the game. Anyone who's read a forum knows that bringing 3+ Wave Serpents or a Knight in a small game is no fun to face, so why take it?

Like I say, maybe I'm putting too much faith in people to put others first, but I do find it odd.

zilka86 wrote:
I play against unbound all the time i think it kind of broken because it lets people run 3riptides 2 wrightkints 2dreadknights and 2knights. This is what a normal list looks like in my meta.
So i would like other people opinions and experience with unbound armys
Also my group does not play mission as i the only obe who wants to so i out voted are games are just death matchs last one standing wins

Unbound doesn't break games, players break games. Are you guys there to have fun, or solely to win?

 Paradigm wrote:

WayneTheGame wrote:
I could accept that the game is unbalanced IF I played in a set group with people who would never abuse it. That's the crux of the entire Spirit of the Game issue: It's not grounded in reality. The way GW plays the game is a way virtually nobody else plays it, and they don't even acknowledge that to be the case.
.

I think you've hit the nail on head about what GW want, and imagine, when they write their rules. However, I don't think the gaming club is as rare as you think, especially here in UK where GW are based. Here, gaming clubs are the norm and the FLGS is practically non-existant outside of GW stores, and so it's this environment they tailor the game for and in which it works best. I have no idea why the situation is reversed elsewhere, but at their very start, it was is this kind of environment and setting that the guys who wrote the game lived and gamed. Whether they should have/have to adapt is another discussion altogether...

Although, I would wonder why it's any different with a less established group of players. Maybe I'm idealising, but I don't see why the anonymity in a less regular group makes one more comfortable with building lists known to be annoying to face, or to exploit the game in ways it clearly isn't meant for. You don't need to be best buddies with your opponent to be able to take into account their experience and enjoyment and put them first.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 MWHistorian wrote:

 Paradigm wrote:
we have to accept the game is unbalanced

No we don't.
I didn't accept it and stopped playing. I expect more for my money.

OK, allow me to rephrase: if we're playing 40k, then we have to accept that. Of course you're free to go and play something else, but that doesn't change the facts of 40k, and that's what the discussion is about.

And I was coming from someone who was playing, saw that the crazyness was only getting worse.
GW drives the direction of the community and right now it feels like the Titanic without a pilot. It's like Battle Royal. They just drop players in and don't care what happens next. With that kind of attitude, it's no wonder the player base is so divided.
It was Unbound that finally got me to step away. To me it showed that GW simply don't care about the game anymore and just want to sell more models. The sad thing is, Unbound could work if there was internal and external codex balance. The fact that unbound is horrible is a symptom of this unbalance.

 Blacksails wrote:
Unbound is just monstrously stupid. I don't even care if its breaks the game or not, its just quite possibly the stupidest thing you can publish in a ruleset.

"Here's a bunch of pages explaining how to make an army. And here's a paragraph telling you to ignore all of that and just take whatever you want! Narrative! Forging! Fluff! Fun!"

You mean how the games was set up in the Old Rouge Trader Days before 2nd Edition?

 Anpu42 wrote:

 Blacksails wrote:
Unbound is just monstrously stupid. I don't even care if its breaks the game or not, its just quite possibly the stupidest thing you can publish in a ruleset.

"Here's a bunch of pages explaining how to make an army. And here's a paragraph telling you to ignore all of that and just take whatever you want! Narrative! Forging! Fluff! Fun!"

You mean how the games was set up in the Old Rouge Trader Days before 2nd Edition?

And RT was an incoherent mess.

 Anpu42 wrote:

 Blacksails wrote:
Unbound is just monstrously stupid. I don't even care if its breaks the game or not, its just quite possibly the stupidest thing you can publish in a ruleset.

"Here's a bunch of pages explaining how to make an army. And here's a paragraph telling you to ignore all of that and just take whatever you want! Narrative! Forging! Fluff! Fun!"

You mean how the games was set up in the Old Rouge Trader Days before 2nd Edition?

Suggesting that because it was done like that before, it was a good thing. There's a reason why 3rd, 4th and maybe 5th tried to tighten up the rules only for 6th to get rid of most of that work.

 Anpu42 wrote:

You mean how the games was set up in the Old Rouge Trader Days before 2nd Edition?

Which has what relevance to the game as it is now?